Transaction Costs

Sophie Romana (left) and Shelley Spencer (right) report back from the June 8 high level roundtable organized by NetHope and USAID, which brought together mobile banking and gender champions to reflect on how Digital Financial Services (DFS) can galvanize women’s empowerment.

Women’s empowerment is often measured by their access to resources and ability to make decisions over how they are used. Recent evidence shows that DFS delivered through mobile phones deserves solid A's against each metric. This is not just hopeful musing by us as two empowered women with banking apps on our mobile phones, it is the consensus of a cross section of thought leaders with a seat at the table in Washington including USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Better than Cash Alliance and UNCDF, CGAP, and Women for Women International, as well as our own organizations, Oxfam and NetHope. We recently spent a morning reflecting on rigorous academic and implementation research on DFS use by women — all to be published soon — and pathways to close the gender gap in DFS product use.

Oxfam has long known that women play a central role in financing family and community needs. What we are now finding is that DFS tools can enhance their role. To study the impact of DFS on Saving for Change (SfC) savings groups in Senegal, Oxfam divided up 210 SfC groups (over 5,000 women) into 2 cohorts: one who participated in the project and the other as a comparison set. Women who participated in the pilot saved and borrowed more than the comparison groups. The differences are not marginal. There is a significant difference in savings.

Nowadays, forming strategic alliances across sectors has become the new operating norm. But the blurring of sectoral boundaries among governments, businesses and NGOs makes it increasingly difficult to assess functions traditionally performed by a certain sector, since conventional boundaries have dissolved, and power and influence are distributed in networks. One sub-set of such collaborations – business-NGO interactions – has attracted much attention, as NGOs begin to move away from their informal, social roles and venture into economic and political territories.

Business-NGO collaborations may come in many forms: NGOs could partner with firms to function as “civil regulators”, primarily by addressing market and government failures through the development of soft laws, social standards, certification schemes, and operating norms; leverage social capital to transfer localized institutional knowledge to firms; mobilize collective action between governments and firms; and serve as information brokers to connect otherwise disparate groups.

How do we assess business-NGO dynamics? Why are they are established? And in what forms are they governed? I source a few inspirations from business, political science, and public administration theories and offer three theoretical lenses through which we can examine business-NGO partnerships.

Our Top Ten blog posts by readership in 2014.
This post was originally posted on January 29, 2014

Around the end December of every year, the pundits start coming out with their forecasts for 2014. This past December, the World Bank pundits predicted everything from girls outperforming boys in developing countries (girl power!) to the staggering idea that for Europe, 2014 will be a better year.

This year though, the World Bank’s Future Development Forecasts blog, included a prediction that caught these two political scientists by surprise— “as more and more economists point to the primary [sic] of politics in development, political scientists will wake up and wonder why they have been left out of the discussion.”

Joel Hellman, the World Bank’s Director of the Center on Conflict, Security and Development in Nairobi (OPSFN), predicted there will be a new movement of “political contextualists.” Meaning: we as development practitioners have to take a look at the broader institutional framework influencing the performance of the economy, and on development in particular. This is particularly relevant with regard to governance reform and strengthening institutions and service delivery in countries.

Politics in development, hear, hear! The World Bank’s People, Spaces and Deliberation blog has been making this case for years. Nevertheless, neither economists nor political scientists have really introduced a convincing framework for how this political contextualization would play out in development: how it influences development and how it helps us understand strategies that promote development effectiveness and the efficiency of development interventions.

Around the end December of every year, the pundits start coming out with their forecasts for 2014. This past December, the World Bank pundits predicted everything from girls outperforming boys in developing countries (girl power!) to the staggering idea that for Europe, 2014 will be a better year.

This year though, the World Bank’s Future Development Forecasts blog, included a prediction that caught these two political scientists by surprise— “as more and more economists point to the primary [sic] of politics in development, political scientists will wake up and wonder why they have been left out of the discussion.”